Seagate has confirmed it will offer a 3TB drive.
As reported by Thinq, the company should announce its 3TB 3.5-inch disk drive by the end of the year, subject to operating system, motherboard BIOS and RAID vendor support.
Disk drives are addressed in 512-byte sectors, logical block addresses (LBAs) as set down by DOS back in …

COMMENTS

FUD

I think it's nonsense to claim XP can't deal with it.

What they mean is can't do it out of the box, or may not run efficiently . But since 1993 you could add drivers for storage devices. XP out of the box won't install on SATA. (I know it's a different issue).

I suppose this is as good a time as any..

to go look for that 1.0 kernel that I have laying about somewhere.. Good thing I don't need to get the latest version of the linux kernel (like you have to do with the ole windoze) to work with these massive disks, eh?

There are lots of good reasons/places to use linux rather than windows.. the fact that the latest version of it supports more hardware than a 10(ish) year old version of windows isn't really one of them...

What! No OS/2 Warp support!

Disk Space Limits

For those wondering, the limits are not a product of the file system in use, and it's debatable whether or not the limit is really the operating system.

Master Boot Record (MBR) partition tables are the only type supported by any 32-bit edition of Windows XP. While NTFS could no doubt go larger, MBR simply runs out of steam at 2TB and that's it. I don't know if any of the NTFS volume spanning tricks and dynamic disks could get you around this or not. What I say here is a result of what I found when I had three 1TB drives running from a HighPoint RAID controller in RAID0 mode. As I only tried this out of curiosity, I didn't experiment further.

To go further, you need something else. The solution that most everyone seems to have agreed upon is the GPT (GUID partition table). Windows XP 32-bit and 2000 both seem to have some awareness of GPT disks, but they don't know how to mount or access one. However, Windows XP in its x86-64 edition does support GPT since it's based on the Windows Server 2003 code base (which also supports GPT).

Windows easily supports the concept of installable file systems, but I don't know about an "installable partition system".

Don't get me started on the advanced format drives...manufacturer support for these is nonexistent if you don't run Windows or Mac OS. It seems that Linux has been OK with these for a while and FreeBSD as an unknown. For now, I'm just running the lone example of an "advanced format" drive that I have in "performance be damned" mode, because I spent hours screwing around in hopes of using the drive and its 4K sector size optimally, after which I finally decided I could be doing better things with my life. As the machine in question is a K6-2 500 box running FreeNAS with a hundred megabit link, I doubt it will ever come anywhere near to the performance level of the advanced format drive.

Haven't even come close to filling the 250Gig one I have.

Haven't had this much disk fun...

since we used to play with hot-rodding run-length limited drives (RLL) under DOS...

Seriously, this just has the potential to be an unmitigated disaster...people buying drives that won't work, configuration issues, an inability to restore after a lost drive (because _that drive_ had all the software updates that enabled larger drives), and even data loss due to configuration issues.

I used to think my least favourite job was Nigerian toilet cleaner - when these drives flood the market, I think I'll change that to "Dell front-line support agent"...